Samsung, Ritek join the 128GB SSD crowd

It has been said that within the next few years solid state drives will replace the aging hard drive and, with the constant storage capacity boosts, the gap between the two looks set to get smaller. Last month, Toshiba announced a new line of SSD drives in three distinct flavors: 32GB, 64GB and 128GB – which should hit store shelves in March. Now, both Samsung and Ridata have joined the fray with their own 128GB SSD models.

Introduced at CES today, three new Ridata drives are available in 128GB, 64GB and 32GB capacities, each claimed to read at 170MB/s and write at 105MB/s. Samsung also doubled the capacity of its latest SATA II SSD offering to 128GB, with a data writing speed of 70 MB/s and 100MB/s peak read speed.

Neither company has revealed pricing information on the new drives. Ridata’s drives are reportedly available now through “system integrators, selected retailers, and Ridata distributors”, while Samsung expects to begin mass producing its 128GB SSD in the first half of 2008.